Saturday, April 21, 2012

The No-So-Wild-Wild West

Man: Do you realize there are now four people behind you pointing handguns at your head?

Robber: Here. You can have my .22.

Man: You're not from this state, are you?

Robber: I'm from Washington, DC.

Man: Figures. I guess you didn't know everyone is this state carries handguns. We have almost no crime anymore--almost no murders, or rapes, or robberies. We hardly have any prisons, because we don't have many prisoners. We even fired 90% of the police. The rest are what they're supposed to be--peace officers.

Robber: What are you going to do with me?

Man: You're lucky we didn't shoot you on the spot. Instead we'll take you over to the courthouse and have a trial. Take about half-an-hour. Then we'll hang you. After all, there are four witnesses that saw you try to rob me with a handgun.

Robber: Now wait a minute! You have to put me in prison! With cable TV, free dental and three square meals a day!

Man: Naw, those days are gone. We're going back to the old days. Why, back in Mark Twain's time--

Robber: Who?

Man: Public school graduate, right?

Robber: I dropped out.

Man: That figures, too. Anyway, back in Mark Twain's time he wrote a woman could travel from one side of the country to the other without being molested by even the roughest of men. You know why, knucklehead?

Robber: Uh uh.

Man: Because there was hardly any government in his time. The bigger and more interfering the government gets, the worse society becomes. You're an example of the kind of human being produced by government interference in society. Broken family, no father, raised on welfare, dropped out of the worthless public schools, belongs to a gang, sells drugs, armed robber...you know why people like Jesse James and Billy the Kid were so well-known in the past?

Robber: Uh, nope.

Man: Because they were so rare everyone knew of them. These days, people like them exists by the hundreds in every large enough city. You're one of them. You know how we fixed the problem?

Robber: Uh, nope.

Man: We've gotten rid of most of the government, and everything in society has gotten better. You can drop your wallet on the sidewalk here, with thousands of dollars in it, and it will be returned with all the money in it. Just like what happened when theat eight-year-old boy found a wallet with almost $2000 in it, in that Laura Ingalls Wilder book, Farmer Boy.

Robber: Hey, I always liked farms! Everything sounds good to me! I'll all for it! You've convinced me! I'm a changed man! I promise I'll be good! Can I go now?

Man: Maybe we shouldn't hang you. I think we'll just give you a good beating instead and send you back to where you came from, as an advertisement to your kind to never come here. Unless, of course, you'd rather have a last cigarette before we slap the horse's rump?